


Drifting and Sleeping

by ifeelbetter



Category: Inception (2010), Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-05
Updated: 2014-04-05
Packaged: 2018-01-18 06:41:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1418680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ifeelbetter/pseuds/ifeelbetter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur was twelve the day the last kaiju died.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Drifting and Sleeping

**Author's Note:**

> This was a tumblr ficlet prompted by [castillon02](http://castillon02.tumblr.com/)

Arthur was twelve the day the last kaiju died. He had never seen an ocean in his life and had never been farther than the border of his tiny Wisconsin hometown. He watched the coverage of the aftermath on the news with his mother on the sofa in their living room and she gripped his hand a little too hard.

The cameras were fixated on those two pilots—was he alive? was she dead? was he breathing? did she come back?—and the grainy, out-of-focus footage just barely caught the moment when their foreheads tipped together.

Arthur—who had never tipped his forehead toward someone in his life—decided he’d have that. He’d have whatever it was that made them bend towards each other like reeds.

***

Eames was fifteen and he didn’t know it was over until two days later when he dropped by the refugee soup kitchen. They were serving cake and someone handed him a glass of champagne.

"What’s this for?" he asked.

"For being alive, mate," someone else—not the person who’d handed him the red plastic cup—responded. "For not being dead."

"Alright," Eames said because, you know, gift horses.

The guy with serving the peas at the other end of the line was the first one who told him the kaiju were gone.

Eames still didn’t have anywhere to sleep, but he supposed it was nice to know for sure the world wouldn’t end anytime soon.

***

By the time Arthur graduated from college, there were military recruitment campaigns for volunteers to expand the potential peacetime uses for Jaeger-tech. They put everyone recruited without a degree into the baseline package and they said that you were lucky if you came back, if you came back and were still you. So Arthur waited and got his degree; he majored in chemistry in the meantime because there was talk about developing the solution used to create the drift. It didn’t particularly appeal—not the chemistry part at least—but Arthur was nothing if not imminently efficient.

So he enlisted after college so that he could get preferential placement.

That’s how he got in at the ground floor in the Somnacin Production Project.

***

The first recruitment tent that got set up in Myanmar and Eames was waiting outside the day they opened their doors.

"Who’s your next of kin?" the buzz-cut, clean-shaven guy asked, looking down at the paperwork.

"Not applicable," Eames drawled.

"You must have someone," the man pressed.

"Never say ‘must,’ my friend," Eames said. "It never ends well."

***

The first time Arthur met Eames, they were both drifting and Arthur ended up shooting him in the face.

Eames always said it was a direct shot to the heart.

Arthur usually shot him again when he said it.

***

The important bit turned out not to be the Jaeger itself—that was functionally useless without a kaiju to combat. No human issue should—or even could—be resolved with a Jaeger. But the drift—that was worth something.

The important bit wasn’t the paired unit anymore, it was who could be lassoed into the drift, who could get caught without the ability to find their footing. There weren’t pairs of people, Arthur found, who turned towards each other like that pair of Jaeger pilots had done in that grainy footage. The beauty of it was all long gone by the time he got there; but he didn’t expect beauty by that point. He’d stopped fantasizing about reeds turning towards each other. It was a child’s dream, after all.

But the Somnacin still threw out the odd paired unit, whatever the scientists might do. Every now and then there would be two people dreaming—not drifting, only old people called it drifting now—and they’d come out….different. Closer. Fused, ever-so-slightly. Arthur watched it happen with Mal and Dom.

If he was jealous, it was his own business.

***

Eames had been through thousands of simulations, experiments, and procedures by the time the Somnacin went public and there were black market dealers who paid a lot better than the British government beating down his door.

He was one of four people alive—surviving—who could control the way the Somnacin portrayed them in the dream. He could name his price.

But it was never quite the same as those two assignments in LA. He didn’t understand the science behind it, he just knew what he knew. It had been perfect for a moment; other than that, it was just more living, more scrabbling after the next bloody day.

He didn’t put two-and-two together until Cobb showed up with clean-pressed Arthur in tow five years later, fresh off of respectability and newly criminal.

The minute they went under together, Eames knew: it was Arthur. That’s why LA had been so much better. That’s what made the difference.

But he’d be damned if a chemical reaction told him who he was stuck with—he’d had enough of people telling him to jump and how high.

***

"I hear he’s in Mumbai," Arthur said, not looking up from the blueprints, even with his heart pounding.

"I’ll get him," Dom said.

Arthur nodded.


End file.
